24 April, 2024

JOOLA Gives Centric Software Top Score

Racket sports brand implements Centric PLM to drive more efficient product development, rationalize data and provide a foundation for growth

CAMPBELL, Calif., April 25, 2024 – Centric Software® is pleased to announce that the sports brand JOOLA has selected their Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution, Centric PLM™. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products such as fashion, outdoor, luxury, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Founded in 1952 in Germany, JOOLA is a globally recognized indoor and outdoor table tennis equipment brand that has sponsored 3 Olympic Games. JOOLA designs and manufactures both hardline goods such as tables, rackets and balls, as well as softline products such as apparel, footwear and accessories. Since 2022, JOOLA has embraced the fast-growing sport of pickleball and expanded into a range of products for pickleball players.

Now headquartered in the US, JOOLA is working hard to grow the brand internationally and wanted a PLM solution to better organize product development data and free up resources.

“We launched the pickleball business in 2022, and we’ve seen tremendous growth since then,” says Richard Lee, CEO of JOOLA. “We’re launching new products left and right, so we definitely need more data organization to make sure we are tracking everything properly.”

Austin Kim, Product Manager at JOOLA, adds, “There’s a lot of cross-team collaboration, especially for design, so that transfer of information and data management can get tricky. User errors happen, and it’s hard to keep everything updated.”

JOOLA conducted extensive PLM research and due diligence, ultimately selecting Centric PLM based on its industry reputation, market leadership and usability. JOOLA will implement Centric PLM for its global operations.

“Our teams are already pretty well-versed in Centric,” says Sunny Le, Director, Softline Products at JOOLA. “We’re excited to start using it, as we’re going to be living in it every day. Along with streamlining processes and organizing data, it’s also going to be beneficial from a labor standpoint as we’ll be able to use resources more efficiently. It will make it really easy for us to work more collaboratively.”

“The Centric team answers any questions we have and provides solutions around best practices,” concludes Kim. “We have had a wonderful time working with them.”

“We are delighted that JOOLA has placed their trust in Centric to build a digital foundation for growth,” says Fabrice Canonge, President of Centric Software. “We look forward to working closely with JOOLA to drive more efficient product development, expansion and innovation.”

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JOOLA (joola.com) Established in Germany in 1952, JOOLA has dominated the professional table tennis scene in the United States for over 15 years. Partnering with North American Table Tennis (NATT) early on, JOOLA established a strong presence through the North American Tour and NATT‘s flagship event, the North American Teams Championships. Each event in the Tour generally drew in 200 to 300 participants and showcased about 30 JOOLA tables, while the Teams event exposed the brand to nearly 1000 players, who competed on about 150 JOOLA tables. With each successful event, JOOLA grew its fan base and eventually became the most visible table tennis brand in US table tennis. JOOLA later served as the Official Table Sponsor of USA Table Tennis’ (USATT), the national governing body for table tennis, major tournaments from 2012 until 2019. This included the US Open and US National Championships. In 2019, Sport Squad, Inc., the US-based distributor and licensee of JOOLA for the North American and Brazilian market., announced its acquisition of JOOLA Tischtennis GmbH. Established in 2006 and based in Rockville, MD, Sport Squad, Inc. was founded by Richard Lee out of a love for table tennis. Sport Squad eventually expanded to include 4 different brands dedicated to offering interactive and immersive games and gaming equipment. It is the parent company to JOOLA, iPong, Sport Squad, and Hit Mit. In 2022, JOOLA launched JOOLA Pickleball and immediately took the sport by storm as the sponsor of pickleball world #1 Ben Johns and a partner of USPPA.